OSDev.org

The story is like on about every news site.. It's rather funny that they are trying to go the patent route. (Desperate..?)

In actuality, I think the USA is the only place where such obscure patent laws are permitted.

Microsoft is probably scared.. Clearly they are trying to force customers away from using superior open source projects

I myself, Will never respect a patent.. It's at the point where people over in the USA can't even starting coding without having their own legal department!

Well, it's obvious that the patent situation in the US is ridiculous, but at the moment I think the US has larger issues to deal with first. That is, leaving certain countries, and avoiding invading other countries for no apparent reason.

Once that's finished, we'll talk.

Alboin wrote:Well, it's obvious that the patent situation in the US is ridiculous, but at the moment I think the US has larger issues to deal with first. That is, leaving certain countries, and avoiding invading other countries for no apparent reason.

Once that's finished, we'll talk.

There's no reason they can't work on all those problems at the same time... Nations have a lot of internal parallelism.

I read about a recent court ruling on the "obviousness" of patents in the US. Maybe things are already starting to get better (slowly).

Hi,

Unfortunately, many "normal" people (e.g. non-technical people) will actually listen to Microsoft, and some large companies have already done deals with Microsoft (Novell, and companies that are only end-users of use Linux). As long as Microsoft don't publicly list which pieces of the OS violate which patents they can continue to say anything they like.

IMHO someone (Redhat?) needs to force Microsoft to list these alleged patent violations by taking some legal action of their own (e.g. sue them for defemation) so that the process of stopping the FUD (um, fixing the alleged patent violations) can begin.

Of course this would probably be the beginning of 20 years of legal action involving many different companies, as everyone tries to figure out who invented what and which patents are actually valid (and accuse others of patent violations in retaliation).

It's fairly insane considering that (in theory) if you repeatedly saved the output from a random number generator as an executable file, eventually you'd violate every software related patent ever granted with no actual thought at all.


Cheers,

Brendan

Personally, despite the pathetic, and obviously desperate nature of resorting to American technicalities i am not "laughing" at Microsoft. In the end, patent laws are the law, and it really does not matter what your personal opinion on a specific law is, you should follow it. The idea that one should side step a law because they don't agree would be slightly more laughable. Hopefully though this will raise awareness about Microsofts failings to the general public though.

Tyler wrote:Personally, despite the pathetic, and obviously desperate nature of resorting to American technicalities i am not "laughing" at Microsoft. In the end, patent laws are the law, and it really does not matter what your personal opinion on a specific law is, you should follow it. The idea that one should side step a law because they don't agree would be slightly more laughable. Hopefully though this will raise awareness about Microsofts failings to the general public though.

In actuality it isn't law here, It's just some crazy American concept.. And I will ignore it (Gladly..)

Just stay on the lookout for motions that your local government is trying to establish similar - or worse! - patent laws.

In the European Union, such an attempt has been foiled at the last minute (by ffii.org and others), and the lobbyists are bound to try again.

Edit: In the end, it's not so much about patent infringement. It's about scaring away large companies and government bodies from switching to Linux. Microsoft has two big levers into the market - being the big player in the games market, and having a next to 100% market share in the bigcorps / government offices. While the gaming market seems secure for some time to come due to the game developer / GPU manufacturer / DirectX symbiosis, Microsoft loses ground in the bigcorp / government sector. Threatening with some vague "legal danger" (and reinforcing the picture of Linux as "pirateware") is just another smokebomb IMHO.

In actuality it isn't law here, It's just some crazy American concept.. And I will ignore it (Gladly..)

I think Canada does have patent laws.. not sure about them. I am sure the U.S. does some export and import with the close neighbor so I assume there would exist some agreement in the Canadian and U.S. patent laws.

Kevin McGuire wrote:

In actuality it isn't law here, It's just some crazy American concept.. And I will ignore it (Gladly..)

I think Canada does have patent laws.. not sure about them. I am sure the U.S. does some export and import with the close neighbor so I assume there would exist some agreement in the Canadian and U.S. patent laws.

Patent laws are present in quite a few countries.. The topic here is "Software Patent Laws" which are not clearly defined outside of the USA.

And I agree with Solars' edit.. It's a scare tactic.. They know for sure that if they play the patent game, Companies who hold patents that MS violates will react.. (IBM for one holds a few.. and is a supporter of Linux..)

You run a random number generator for a few trillion(This could be far less..) years you would violate every US patent without even thinking.

Patents make it almost entirely impossible to make a product that is "Compatible" with another, Even if you wrote all the code yourself.. It's nonsense and it slows down innovation.

Brynet-Inc wrote: You run a random number generator for a few trillion(This could be far less..) years you would violate every US patent without even thinking.

I knew a lawyer who attempted to use this argument (in the early days of public computer storage) in a child pornography case... luckily he didnt win, but it was almost the OJ case all over again.

The whole point of the law though (at least in England, because we know america doesnt care) is to protect original thought. So if you purposely break patent, then there exists an issue, but if you independently come up with the idea you are pretty safe here, so the random generator is more a matter of intent.

I have seen many things that go on the same general concept as something already patented, but they changed a few minor things and got away with it, so since none of our code is exactly the same...

excuse me, I'm only 16, so law I don't extremely know...

I do think the SOFTWARE patent system sucks...

I'm very suprised microsoft hasn't tried to patent stupid things like how the GUI concept is, or how it (or at least use to) use the BIOS to access the floppy drive

meh...anyway

Topic title wrote:Anyone else laughing at Microsofts recent patent claims?

I laugh, I live ~9500 kilometers away from USA (Kansas City for being precise) and I don't support M$ very much. Even if I am using Windows - i never bought it in the market. No no, it is not cr@ck€d, but I got it preinstalled with my, formerly brand new, Personal Computer.

inflater